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MEMS

In the paper “Degeneracy Breaking, Modal Symmetry and MEMS Biosensors”, which was presented at the COMSOL Conference 2013 in Rotterdam, researchers experiment with using material and geometric symmetry breaking to design a MEMS biosensor.

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If you look up at the night sky, especially somewhere far away from city lights, you will see the stars twinkle. While an inspiration for poets and romantics throughout time, the beauty of the starry night sky has also been a challenge to astronomers studying the night sky and the universe. It has led to the development of adaptive optics, which is used nowadays to improve the power of optical systems beyond the obstacles imposed by the optical medium.

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We have introduced a new interface for simulating piezoelectric devices in version 5.0 of the COMSOL Multiphysics simulation software. This interface aims to achieve several things. In this blog post, I will explain what these things are and how you can use them.

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Surface micromachining is a process used to manufacture MEMS devices, which includes accelerometers. In this blog post, we model the electric field and forces within an accelerometer as well as highlight a new geometry feature available in COMSOL Multiphysics version 5.0.

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With its growing use in numerous applications, the demand for graphene has steadily increased over the years. This heightened interest has prompted new research behind the methods for synthesizing graphene — one of which is chemical vapor deposition. See how one research team used modeling to analyze and enhance the CVD graphene growth mechanism.

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Standards form an integral part of the work we do as engineers, providing a common language for communicating complex information. But standards committees are not omnipotent and sometimes revised standards are not universally adopted. This has happened in the case of the standards for piezoelectric materials, particularly for quartz. This blog post explains the multiple standards used to describe piezoelectrics in literature. Although the particular focus of this post is on quartz, the standards described apply for any piezoelectric material.

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If you are searching for a tutorial on how to model a miniaturized 3D electromechanics problem, then look no further. We have just published an updated version of our video tutorial on how to simulate a capacitive pressure sensor. COMSOL Multiphysics version 4.4 and the MEMS Module are used to simulate the electrostatic, structural, and thermal physics that occur.

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The direct and inverse piezoelectric effects are strongly related to how anisotropic the material is, which in turn is related to the crystalline structure of the piezoelectric material. The extent of anisotropy can also be influenced by a process called poling. Here, I’ll discuss how you can correctly model the crystal orientation and poling direction of a piezoelectric material in your COMSOL simulations.

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An RF MEMS switch is an electromechanical component found in RF systems. It usually consists of a micromechanical bridge or cantilever, a substrate, and an electrode or dielectric layer. These devices can switch at RF frequencies and tend to have high isolation, i.e. power loss when the switch turns off; low insertion loss (loss of signal power when the switch is on), and extremely low (almost zero!) power consumption. Let’s take a look at how you can use COMSOL Multiphysics […]

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I recently had the pleasure of preparing a small contribution to the 166th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (Fall 2013) together with Wade Conklin and Jordan Schultz from Knowles Electronics. Wade presented our paper entitled “Characterization of a microelectromechanical microphone using the finite element method”. The work consisted of implementing a virtual prototype of a Knowles MEMS microphone (the SPU0409LE5H microphone, see picture below) using COMSOL Multiphysics.

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If you are using a cell phone, GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi, chances are that they all have BAW resonators working inside them. All wireless electronic equipment use RF filters to help narrow down the frequency range they should operate within. With thousands of devices working within closely-packed radio frequencies, it is becoming increasingly important to design filters that would be able to reduce interference from unwanted frequencies, boost the signal-to-noise ratio, and lower insertion loss. Doing so may lead to […]